# The Falcon Strikes
---
The afternoon had changed.
Something in the quality of it — the light, perhaps, or the crowd's mood, or simply the accumulation of the day's events pressing themselves into the air above the tournament ground and changing its atmosphere the way weather changes before a storm. The morning's clean excitement had been replaced by something more complicated. The crowd was louder but less purely joyful, the noise carrying an edge that pure sporting enthusiasm doesn't produce — an awareness, distributed across ten thousand people in varying degrees of consciousness, that what was happening here was not only what appeared to be happening here.
The Mountain was still in the lists.
Waymar Royce was not.
---
**Ser Loras Tyrell** rode out to the sound of roses.
This was approximately what it felt like — the crowd's response to the Knight of Flowers was not the roar they gave to the Mountain or the complicated murmur they gave to controversial figures, but something warmer and more willing, the sound of genuine affection for a young man who was beautiful and brilliant and wore Highgarden's colors with the ease of someone born to them. Women threw flowers. The flowers were real. Some of them landed near his horse and his horse, which was excellent and knew it, stepped over them with elegant indifference.
He was nineteen years old.
He rode like a man who has never seriously considered the possibility of falling.
Michel watched him from the preparation area with the calm, systematic attention he applied to all opponents and noted — again, confirming what he had seen in the morning — the things that were true about Loras Tyrell. The speed. The excellent hands. The way he read the approach and made his adjustments early and with confidence. The roses on his shield, which were not merely decorative but an accurate description of the man — beautiful and thorned, the beauty the first thing you noticed and the thorns the thing that mattered.
He watched the Mountain at the other end.
And he watched the draw.
*They gave Loras the Mountain,* he thought. *Someone arranged that.*
He looked at the Lannister section without turning his head.
Tywin was watching the lists with the composed attention of a man watching something he has already decided the outcome of.
---
The first pass between Loras and the Mountain was — almost absurd.
The Mountain came the way he always came — with the absolute, annihilating commitment of something that has decided direction is the only relevant variable and speed is the only relevant quantity. His lance was a battering ram. His horse was an engine. Everything about him was designed for one outcome and one outcome only.
Loras did not meet him straight.
This was the thing — the thing that made the crowd gasp and then roar — Loras didn't ride the line that every other man had ridden against the Mountain, the straight committed line that delivered you into the full force of what was coming. He adjusted. Late, impossibly late, at the last possible moment before impact, the shift so slight and so precise that it had the quality of something that shouldn't be physically achievable and was — and the Mountain's lance caught his shield at the wrong angle, glancing rather than driving, the force dispersed rather than absorbed —
And Loras's lance found the gap.
The Mountain rocked.
More than he had rocked against Waymar.
Considerably more.
The crowd lost its composure entirely.
The sound of ten thousand people who have just watched the Mountain be seriously threatened was something between a roar and a collective expression of disbelief — a sound that had shock in it, and delight, and the particular giddiness of witnessing something you were told wasn't possible.
---
Second pass.
The Mountain came angry now.
This was visible. This was legible to anyone watching with the right eyes — the difference between the Mountain riding to win and the Mountain riding to destroy, the slight forward lean of the enormous body, the quality of the grip on the lance, the way his horse responded to something communicated through his seat that had nothing to do with horsemanship and everything to do with rage.
Loras saw it.
His adjustment this time was different — more conservative, more protective, the roses on his shield presented at the angle of a man who has decided that survival is the precondition of victory and is not too proud to acknowledge it.
The impact was enormous.
Loras left his saddle.
But — and this was the thing, the thing the crowd immediately understood and responded to with another roar — he did not fall.
He *dismounted.*
In the air. In the chaos of the impact and the shattered lances and the force of it, Loras Tyrell performed the extraordinary act of leaving his horse in a controlled way, landing on his feet with the stumbling but ultimately upright landing of someone who had decided mid-air that falling was unacceptable and had found a way to make that decision physical.
He was on his feet.
His shield was broken.
His lance was gone.
He was on his feet.
And his horse — the mare he had ridden, which had been moving fast and was now riderless — had hit the Mountain's destrier in the confusion, and the Mountain's horse, startled and off-balance —
Gregor Clegane hit the ground.
The sound of it was something you felt in your spine.
Seven feet and four hundred pounds of armoured knight meeting packed tournament earth with all the grace the situation permitted, which was none.
The crowd —
The crowd became something animal.
The noise was beyond description. It was not the sound of people watching a tournament. It was the sound of people watching something they will tell their grandchildren about, the release of tension that had been building since morning, since Waymar Royce's broken body, since *accidents happen* delivered with Tywin Lannister's cold courtesy —
The Mountain was down.
---
He rose.
Of course he rose.
Things like Gregor Clegane did not stay down — they could not be made to stay down by falls or impacts or the ordinary physics of violence, could only be managed, slowed, redirected, which was itself terrifying enough.
He rose and he turned and he looked at Loras Tyrell with the specific, focused quality of something that has been embarrassed in front of ten thousand people and has processed that information and arrived at a conclusion about what happens next.
He drew his sword.
The sound of it — the steel singing out of the scabbard — hit the crowd like cold water, the celebration dying instantly into something else, something much colder, because this was no longer tournament.
This was not jousting.
This was a mountain deciding to kill something.
He moved toward Loras.
Loras had his hand on his own sword but he was on the ground, without his horse, with a broken shield, and the Mountain was coming with the momentum of something that has committed entirely to a single direction and the direction was him —
*"Sandor."*
One word.
Not shouted. Not theatrical. Just — placed into the moment with the flat authority of someone who has given a command and expects it to be obeyed.
**The Hound** moved.
He came from the side of the field with the speed of a man who had been watching and waiting and had known this moment was coming before it arrived — not as fast as his brother, because no one was as fast as Gregor Clegane and Sandor Clegane knew this better than anyone alive — but with the specific, calculated positioning of a man who has spent his entire life understanding his brother's violence and knows exactly where to be to interrupt it.
He put himself between the Mountain and Loras.
His own sword drawn.
The two brothers faced each other across the ten feet of tournament ground.
And something moved through the crowd that was beyond noise — a silence so complete and so sudden that it was itself a sound, the held breath of ten thousand people who understood they were watching something that had nothing to do with the tournament at all.
---
*"Enough."*
**Robert Baratheon** was on his feet.
He was not shouting. He was using the voice he used when he was not asking — the voice that had once carried across battlefields, that had once stopped men in the middle of swinging swords at each other because the authority in it was simply, constitutionally, impossible to ignore.
*"I said — enough."*
The Mountain stopped.
Not because he wanted to. The wanting was visible — the wanting was in every line of him, in the grip on the sword, in the direction of the eyes. But the not-stopping had a cost attached to it that even Gregor Clegane's specific version of intelligence could calculate, which was the cost of defying a direct royal command in front of the entirety of the court.
He stopped.
Loras breathed.
The Hound did not lower his sword.
Robert looked across the tournament ground with the expression of a king who has just remembered why he sometimes hated what kingship required of him — the management of things that should not require management, the public performance of authority over situations that authority had failed to prevent.
He sat down.
He reached for his cup.
The tournament continued.
---
Michel was already at his horse.
---
The preparation was brief and entirely internal.
He had watched everything — Loras and the Mountain, the Mountain's rage, the Hound's intervention, Robert's command, Tywin's face through all of it — and he had filed all of it in the appropriate places and set it aside.
Right now there was only one thing.
**Jaime Lannister** was at the other end of the list.
---
Jaime was — Michel was honest about this, as he was honest about everything — exceptional.
Not in the way the Mountain was exceptional, which was the exceptionalism of scale and force and the simple terrible physics of mass. Jaime's exceptionalism was the other kind — the kind that came from the meeting of natural talent with serious application, from years of genuine dedication to the craft of violence refined into something that was almost aesthetic in its execution.
He was the best natural jouster currently living.
Possibly the best pure knight.
He was also —
Michel thought about a window and a boy and a fall and *convenient.*
He was also a man capable of things that his reputation as the finest knight in the realm did not accommodate.
These were both true simultaneously.
Michel was not going to think about the second one right now.
Right now there was only the list and the horse and the lance and the calculation.
---
Jon was at his stirrup.
*"He's seen your morning bout,"* Jon said. *"He'll account for your accuracy."*
*"Yes,"* Michel said.
*"He'll adjust his line. He won't give you the same approach twice."*
*"No."*
Jon was quiet for a moment.
*"You could take him in two passes,"* Jon said. *"The way he holds his lance — he carries it slightly high on the approach. If you —"*
*"Jon."*
*"My lord."*
*"I'm not taking him in two passes."*
A beat.
Jon looked at him.
Michel looked back — and in his look was something that Jon had not seen in quite this specific configuration before. Not anger. Not heat. Something colder and more deliberate than either of those things — the expression of a man who has made a decision and made it completely and is done with the making of it and ready for the doing.
*"First pass,"* Jon said slowly. *"You're going to end it first pass."*
*"Yes."*
*"He'll be coming at full speed. The risk of —"*
*"I know the risk,"* Michel said.
*"If the lance shatters badly —"*
*"Jon."*
Silence.
*"Yes, my lord."*
*"Watch Tywin,"* Michel said. *"When it's done — watch his face. I want to know what he does."*
Jon looked at him for one long moment.
Then he stepped back.
*"I'll watch,"* he said.
---
Michel rode out.
The crowd gave him the Arryn noise — warm, genuine, the affection of people who associated the falcon with the old ways, with honest lordship, with the qualities the capital had been trying to remember it valued since Robert sat the throne. He acknowledged it without performance — a single inclination of the head, the gesture of a man receiving something real and treating it as such.
He looked at the royal box.
**Sansa** was watching.
She was composed — entirely, outwardly composed, the face she wore in public arranged with the skill that months of practice had made natural. But he knew her face now with the knowledge that comes from proximity and genuine attention, and he saw in it the things the composition was containing — the concentration, the care, the specific quality of attention that was different from the attention she gave other things.
He looked at her for exactly as long as it took to receive what she was offering.
Then he faced forward.
---
**Jaime** was already at the end of the list.
He looked — as he always looked — as though this was all slightly beneath him and he was participating out of generosity rather than necessity. The golden armour. The Lannister colors. The handsome face carrying its perpetual expression of elegant amusement with the world's insistence on taking itself seriously.
He looked at Michel.
And something shifted in the elegant amusement.
Sharpened.
The genuine fighter in him, beneath the performance — the part of Jaime Lannister that was real when everything else was theatre — recognising something across the list that required its full attention.
He adjusted his grip on the lance.
Michel saw it.
*Good,* he thought. *Pay attention. You should pay attention.*
---
The herald's flag dropped.
---
The world compressed into the narrow corridor of the list.
Hoofbeats. His own heartbeat. The lance in his hand — the weight of it, the balance of it, the feel of it as his horse accelerated beneath him and the distance between himself and Jaime Lannister began its rapid, irreversible collapse.
Jaime was coming hard.
Harder than expected — the full commitment of a man who had decided that if Michel intended to end this in one pass then he would meet that intention with his own, that two men coming at each other with complete commitment was the correct response to a first pass and he would not be the one to blink first.
Forty yards.
Michel felt his horse beneath him — the great chest expanding and contracting, the hooves on the packed earth, the engine of it, the simplicity of it, this most ancient of things, a man on a horse going fast toward something.
Thirty yards.
He saw Jaime's lance coming.
He saw the adjustment — the slight repositioning that Jon had predicted, Jaime accounting for Michel's accuracy, presenting a different angle than the approach had suggested, the tactical mind at work behind the golden armour.
Twenty yards.
*He's good,* Michel thought, with the clean, impersonal appreciation of someone assessing a genuine opponent.
*He's very good.*
Ten yards.
*But I am not jousting today.*
---
The impact.
---
It was not the clean, technical, perfectly placed hit of a man playing the sport.
It was something else.
Michel had ridden every tournament of his adult life with a certain measured application of force — sufficient to win, calibrated to the situation, the controlled deployment of capability in service of the specific goal.
He did not do that this time.
This time he brought everything.
The full force of everything he had — everything he was, everything that had been building since the morning, since Waymar Royce's legs, since *accidents happen*, since thirty yards of tournament ground and Tywin Lannister's dismissive gaze —
His lance found Jaime's shield at the precise point where force could not be diverted or absorbed.
And he drove it.
---
The sound was wrong.
Everyone in the stands heard it — heard the difference between the sound this made and the sound a joust was supposed to make, heard the additional note in it, the something-extra that said this had exceeded the frame of the expected.
Jaime Lannister left his saddle.
Not the way Waymar had left his saddle — not with the broken, helpless departure of someone overwhelmed by superior force. Jaime left his saddle the way excellent knights leave saddles when they have been hit by something they couldn't fully account for — fighting it, compensating, his body attempting right up to the last possible moment to find the adjustment that would let him stay on —
Finding nothing.
He came down hard.
The lance had shattered at the point of impact — as lances do, as they are designed to do — and the shattering had sent fragments outward with the physics of the thing, the stored force expressing itself in every direction simultaneously. Most of it went wide. Most of it was harmless in the way that splinters are harmless.
Not all of it.
A section of the shaft — eight inches, sharp where it had broken, driven by the residual force of the impact — found the gap between Jaime's gauntlet and vambrace where the armour separated on the left side.
It went in.
And another fragment — smaller, lighter, driven in a different direction — struck the edge of his visor at an angle that the visor had not been designed to accommodate, and the edge of the fragment found the thin gap between the visor and the cheekguard —
Jaime hit the ground and lay still for a moment that lasted too long.
Then he moved.
Then the sounds he was making reached the stands.
---
The blood.
There was more of it than tournaments produce.
It came from the hand first — running from beneath the gauntlet where the fragment had gone in, the bright specific red of it visible against the golden metal, pooling in the packed earth beside him. And from the face — the fragment had opened something along the jaw and cheek, not deeply, not catastrophically, but bleeding with the determined enthusiasm that facial wounds always display, covering the lower part of his face in the specific dramatic way that makes wounds look worse than they are and ensures that everyone watching understands something significant has happened.
Jaime lay in the dirt of the tournament ground.
Beautiful and golden and bleeding.
The crowd had gone the silence that crowds go when beauty is broken.
---
The Maester was already moving.
From the Lannister section — Tywin on his feet, and this was noteworthy, Tywin Lannister had risen from his seat, which was something that Tywin Lannister essentially never did in response to external events, which said everything about the magnitude of what had just happened — his voice carrying the contained, controlled urgency of a man who will not show fear but will not waste time pretending nothing is wrong.
*"Maester. Now."*
The maester went.
---
Michel had ridden to the end of the list.
He turned his horse.
He looked at what had happened with the steady, complete attention of someone who will not look away from consequences, who has accepted that consequences belong to actions and actions are made consciously and looking away is a form of dishonesty that he does not permit himself.
Jaime was being helped up by his squire and the maester and the Lannister guards who had materialized from somewhere. He was upright. He was conscious. The blood on his face was stark in the afternoon light but the way he held himself said that the damage, while real, was not the worst kind.
He would be all right.
Michel had known the risk when he had made the decision. Had assessed it. Had accepted it. Had understood that riding at that force with that intention created possibilities that couldn't all be controlled.
He had done it anyway.
He held that.
He rode back down the list slowly.
Past Jaime's squire and the maester working on the hand. Past the Lannister guards. Past the blood on the ground.
He reached the section of the stands where Tywin Lannister stood.
He stopped his horse.
He looked up.
---
.Tywin Lannister looked down at him.
The old lion's face was — contained. Completely, masterfully contained, the decades of practiced composure doing their work, giving away nothing that hadn't been decided to give away. The eyes were cold and present and entirely without the shock that other men's eyes would have held.
He was calculating.
He was already three moves ahead.
He would always be calculating.
That was what he was.
Michel held his gaze.
He reached up and removed his helm.
And then — with the precise, deliberate courtesy of a man who knows exactly what he is doing and intends every syllable of it — he said:
"My apologies, my lord."
Measured. Respectful. Pitched to carry to Tywin and the people immediately around him and no further.
"In jousting —"
A pause.
The pause of a man choosing his final word with the care it deserved.
"— accidents happen."
The words.
Placed like stones.
Final. Closed. Done.